They were labeled unfit parents, promiscuous or simply feebleminded, then sent by a thousands to surgeons who ensured they would never have babies again - or never at all. The records are interred in rows of gray boxes in a cold basement of a state archives, waiting for survivors of North Carolina's eugenic sterilization program to step forward and claim them. State officials contend they believe at least 1,500 of a women, girls, boys and men sterilized under state authority from 1929 to 1974 are still alive. But one year into a three-year quest to find them, usually 34 files have been matched with living survivors or descendants of a dead. And officials' talk of paying for a victims' pain could end as a fake hope. A handful of survivors have gone open with their wrenching stories, drawing national attention. Yet those closest to North Carolina's effort to make victims whole question whether a state is acting in good faith. "Some of (the survivors) have told me, 'Mr. Womble, they're trying to wait until we all die,' " says state Rep. Larry Womble of Winston-Salem, who's been pushing a victims' cause for a decade. Gov. Bev Perdue created a N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation last year to shine some light on a dark time in North Carolina history. In a early part of a 20th century, authorities in this and other states embraced a thought of eugenics - a science of improving a human race by reducing a number of children born to parents with undesirable traits. In practice, "undesirable" parents included ones with epilepsy and mental illness; it also included ones who were uneducated, abused or simply poor. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina - one of many similar boards across a country - authorized sterilization of roughly 7,600 North Carolinians. Mecklenburg County did a most in a state, by far. From 1946 to 1968, when a state kept its most detailed records, 485 people in Mecklenburg were sterilized through a eugenics board. Gaston County was third, with 161. ! The bo ard sterilized people who fell into three categories: mental illness, such as schizophrenia; epilepsy; and people classified as "feebleminded," which usually meant a low score on an IQ test. The board looked at other factors. Some people were pegged as too sexually active, or hard to control, or stuck in poverty. Most were women or girls. Some were as young as 10. The Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation is supposed to find a survivors. The state gave a foundation a $250,000 budget, spread over three years. That money pays for a staff - a full-time director, plus two part-timers - and an office in a state education building. The foundation built a website and sent posters to social services offices throughout a state. But there's no money to advertise or send people into a field. Charmaine Fuller Cooper, senior manager director of a foundation, says she's depending on news reports to get a message out. She suspects some survivors don't want to be found; they might want to forget what happened, or might never have told their families. "This is a closet that we're opening," she says. "You never know what we can find." The saddest matchmaking Cooper and her assistants are taking about 200 calls a month now. They talk any tourist through a process of seeing whether they or their loved ones are in a files. When she gets a batch of applications - a last was about 50 - she walks them a block over to a archives. In an age where most everything is accessible with a click, a eugenics records show a methods of a different era. Each patient was logged onto a piece of cardboard, like a old library card catalogs. Social Security numbers weren't used. Addresses were often route and box numbers. Eight trays are jammed full of a cards. They're kept in an underground storage space kept below 65 degrees. State officials are emphatic about guarding a privacy of those who may have lived with decades of shame. Staffers sworn to protect a confidentiality of a records check a card catalo! g. If th ey find a match, they copy a 10- to 20-page file from a long lines of gray storage boxes, which resemble a columbarium used to store ashes of a dead. It may be a saddest matchmaking operation in a country. Heirs are already arguing over whether to unearth files that tell of incest, sexual abuse, domestic violence, grinding poverty and degradingly obsolete attitudes toward people with mental seizure or retardation. Compensation complications Even when a foundation does find survivors, it's not clear what - if anything - a state will do for them. North Carolina is a first state to seriously consider compensating survivors. In March, Perdue created a five-person task force to figure out possible cash payments for people sterilized under a eugenics board. The task force has met four times but hasn't settled on an amount; a number it has talked about most is $20,000 per victim. But nothing's final, and a task force won't make an official recommendation until February. The thought of compensating survivors has support across a political spectrum; both a liberal NAACP and a conservative/libertarian John Locke Foundation have come out in favor. The problem is money. In Canada, a Locke Foundation notes, court judgments have forced large payouts: $740,000 to one eugenics victim who sued, $142 million to about 1,000 victims in another suit. Even a $20,000 payment being discussed in North Carolina would add up to $30 million if 1,500 survivors were compensated. And North Carolina, like most states, is trying to cut from its budget rather than add to it. The reluctance to pay angers Womble. He learned of a state-sponsored sterilizations when an academic researcher unearthed a records in a 1990s and shared them with a reporter from a Winston-Salem Journal, who called Womble. "I really cried when I heard about it. I said, 'What? Not in America!' " he said. He wants his colleagues in a legislature to approve money for cash compensation, education, medical care and counseling for surviving v! ictims. He wants a state to get far more aggressive in its search for survivors: ads on buses and billboards, satellite offices around a state. Perdue was hosting a Southern Governors' Association meeting in Asheville late last week; a spokesman pronounced she was unavailable to comment. Womble has introduced a bill that would provide $20,000 for any living survivor. He says it's up to a House speaker - now Thom Tillis, a Mecklenburg Republican - to let it get out of committee for a vote. Tillis's press spokesman, Jordan Shaw, pronounced Monday that he would try to get Tillis to talk about sterilization later in a week. After that, neither Shaw nor Tillis returned calls. Womble doesn't buy a "no money" pitch: "You found a money to do a program. Find a money to compensate a victims." Cooper finds herself forming a spiritual bond with those who step up. "There's something in how they speak. They're very calm, almost angelic," she says. "To go through a things these people had to go through, we have to have a higher power with you." She pronounced she believes a usually way a open will understand a enormity of what happened is to hear a victims' stories. And it's those stories, she says, that will spur legislators to make sure those who have spoken out are not sent divided with empty apologies. "The question now is, what do a legislators perceive as justice?" Cooper says. "If we're still casting visualisation on victims from 40 or 50 years ago, are we any better? 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